Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
This article originally published in 2015 as part ofVultures Tarantino Week.
Weve updated it to include the auteurs latest,Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Few directors give you the sense that theyregetting offso much on their own work.
For better, and occasionally for worse, Tarantino really digs Tarantino.
What Nazis were inInglourious Basterds, slaveholders are here: people who are a gas to exterminate.
Every bullet generates a whoopee cushions worth of red sauce.
Carnage rarely comes so morally uncomplicated.
And however much I like violent movies, thats not a good thing.
This is Tarantinos most financially successful movie, and a lot of people love its rituals of retribution.
But for all its pleasures, I think its too easy, too dead-center in Tarantinos comfort zone.
It seems perversely crabbed, nihilistic, and shot through with cruelty for crueltys sake.
As usual, his foreplay is brilliant.
As Tarantino takes the measure of the space, the men take the measure of one another.
Tarantino has left emotional quandaries behind.
Hes in the grindhouse revenge ether now, high on his own silly, can-you-top-this gross-out carnage.
Hes a predatory humanist.
The second set of women show up before weve fully digested the fate of the first group.
The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some whacked-out Jungian level, its all of a piece.
Tarantino: Thats a lotta adjectives.
Rose:But I like that!
Tarantino: Yeah, I like that, too, actually.
Okay, maybe I didnt need Jungian.
But its the climax that is most outlandish.
Its essentially a chamber drama with a small, all-male cast thats set (largely) in one place.
Its not a clean wound.
There is no center of gravity.
I think he is a sadist, at least when it comes to onscreen violence.
The troubling thing is that he has become less ambivalent about violence as he has aged.
It is now more righteous, more ejaculatory, more fun.
5.Kill Bill: Vol.
Actually, the movie begins in the middle, with her second major kill.
Inadvertently, she nails Vernita Green (Vivica A.
Fox) in front of the womans very young daughter, and the moment hangs, ugly and unresolved.
What distances the movie from its models is the fanboy giddiness that Tarantino brings to the party.
He has never donepureaction before: This time, he throws himself whole-hog into the carnage.
you’ve got the option to almost hear him cackle, This isso cool.
4.Kill Bill: Vol.
2(2004)
Why would I place this ahead ofVol.
1instead of just ranking them together?
But also to underscore the idea that theyre truly different films.
It opens in a desert with the wedding of Beatrix, a.k.a.
Black Mamba, a.k.a.the Bride (Uma Thurman), which ends in carnage.
But violence isnt the thing here.
After killing scores of people inVol.
(First commenter to say Youre comparing Tarantino to Shakespeare???
gets his/her head sliced off with a Hattori Hanzo sword.)
That said, is there anything inKill Billto make us question our cultures addiction to violent fantasies of retribution?
A little, maybe.
But not enough to keep Tarantino from making his last two movies pretty much straight-ahead vengeance thrillers.
That violence: Its almost all offscreen and very nearly blood-free.
Not seeing the dead man makes his death more haunting.
Could she really be dead?
Its strangeness posed so many challenges.
Why did it sound like that?
Why was it shaped like that?
Why did something with so many dissimilar parts work so harmoniously and have such an emotional kick?
But it brings the movie to its remarkable close.
Alas, there is nothing as formally daring asPulp Fictionin the rest of Tarantinos oeuvre.
